Florence Kelley (1859-1932)
Florence Kelley was a social reformer and political activist who championed government regulation to protect working women and children.
Kelley was born into a Pennsylvania Quaker and Unitarian family with a strong commitment to abolitionist and women's rights activism. After reading through her father's library and graduating from Cornell, Kelley studied law and government at the University of Zurich, joined the German Social Democratic party, and translated Friedrich Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England into English. In 1884 Kelley married a socialist Russian medical student and the couple had three children. After returning to the U.S., she divorced in 1891 and joined Jane Addams and other reformers at Hull House, the Chicago social settlement. In 1892 the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics hired her to investigate the "sweating" system in the garment industry and the federal commissioner of labor Carroll Wright asked her to survey Chicago's nineteenth ward, her findings appearing in Hull House Maps and Papers. She was soon appointed chief factory inspector by Illinois Governor John Peter. Kelley earned her law degree from Northwestern University in 1895.
In 1899 Kelley became head of the National Consumer's League (NCL), a position she held for over thirty years, and moved to Lillian Wald's Henry Street Settlement in New York City. Working for the NCL, Kelley organized local leagues and lobbied for better working conditions and minimum wage and shorter working hours legislation. She helped Josephine Goldmark, director of research at NCL, to prepare the successful "Brandeis brief" defense of 10-hour workday legislation for women in the 1908 U.S. Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon. The following year the NCL launched a minimum wage campaign, which eventually succeeded in obtaining the passage of fourteen state laws for women. Kelley later helped extend such state legislation to male workers.
In 1909 Kelley also helped organize the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. She was a founder of the National Child Labor Committee and her efforts contributed greatly to the creation in 1912 of the U.S. Children's Bureau, the only government agency run by women, and the 1921 passage of the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act that allocated federal funds to health care programs administered by the Bureau. In 1919 Kelley was a founding member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom and for several years she served as vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Kelley spent her final decade defending herself from attacks during the "red scare" of the 1920s and stressing the concrete gains of gender-specific labor legislation to those committed only to laws applying to both sexes. Many of Kelley's ideas were later incorporated into New Deal programs.
OCP Resources
Kelley, Florence. Admission of women to universities. [S.I.: s.n., 18--?].
Kelley, Florence. Our Toiling Children. Chicago: Woman's Temperance Publication Association, 1889
Kelley, Florence. Child labor legislation and enforcement in New England and the middle States. New York : National Child Labor Committee, [1905?]
Kelley, Florence and Jane Addams. Child labor. Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1905.
Kelley, Florence. Women in Trade Unions. New York: s.n., 1906?
Kelley, Florence. The federal government and the working children. New York City: National Child Labor Committee, 1906?
Kelley, Florence. Obstacles to the Enforcement of Child Labor Legislation. New York City: National Child Labor Committee, 1907?
Kelley, Florence. The responsibility of the consumer. New York City: National Child Labor Committee, 1908?
Kelley, Florence. Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation. New York: Macmillan, 1910.
Kelley, Florence. Minimum Wage Boards. New York City: National Consumers' League, 1911.
Goldmark, Pauline Dorothea. The truth about wage-earning women and the state: a reply to Miss Minnie Bronson. New York City: Distributed by National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1912
Kelley Florence, "Factory inspection" in vol. 3 of Woman and the Larger Citizenship. Chicago: Civics Society, 1913-1914.
Kelley, Florence. The Present Status of Minimum Wage Legislation. New York City: National Consumers' League, 1913.
Kelley, Florence. "Women and social legislation in the United States," in Women in Public Life. Philadelphia: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1914.
Kelley, Florence. Modern Industry: in relation to the family, health, education, morality. New York: Longmans, Green 1914.
Kelley, Florence. Women in Industry: the Eight Hours Day and Rest at Night, upheld by the United States Supreme Court. New York: National Consumers' League, 1916.
Kelley, Florence. Wage-earning women in war time: the textile industry (with special reference in Pennsylvania and New Jersey to woolen and worsted yarn, and in Rhode Island to the work of women at night). [N.p., n.d.].
Kelley, Florence, ed. Twenty Questions about the Federal Amendment Proposed by the National Woman's Party. New York: National Consumers' League, 1922.